e taught to look upon him as
a Jacobite, and they proceeded so far in their detestation as to throw
stones at him as he passed through the streets. The chapter of St.
Patrick's, like the rest of the kingdom, received him with great
reluctance. They thwarted him in every particular he proposed. He was
avoided as a pestilence, opposed as an invader, and marked out as an
enemy to his country. Such was his first reception as Dean of St.
Patrick's. Fewer talents and less firmness must have yielded to such
violent opposition. But so strange are the revolutions of this world
that Dean Swift, who was then the detestation of the Irish rabble,
lived to govern them with absolute sway.

He made no longer stay in Ireland than was requisite to establish
himself a dean, and in the beginning of the year 1714, returned to
England. He found his great friends at the helm much disunited among
themselves. He saw the queen declining in health and distressed in
situation. The part which he had to act upon this occasion was not so
difficult as it was disagreeable; he exerted all his skill to reunite
the ministers. Finding his endeavors fruitless, he retired to a
friend's house in Berkshire, where he remained till the queen's death,
an event which fixed the period of his views in England and made him
return as fast as possible to his deanery in Ireland, oppressed with
grief and discontent.

His works from the year 1714 to the year 1720 are few in number and of
small importance. "Poems to Stella" and "Trifles to Dr. Sheridan" fill
up a great part of that period. But during this interval, Lord Orrery
supposes, he employed his time in writing "Gulliver's Travels." His
mind was likewise fully occupied by an affecting private incident. In
1713 he had formed an intimacy with a young lady in London, to whom he
became a kind of preceptor; her real name was Vanhomrigh, and she was
the daughter of a Dutch merchant who settled and died at Dublin. This
lady was a great admirer of reading, and had a taste for poetry. This
increased her regard for Swift till it grew to affection, and she made
him an offer of marriage, which he refused, and upon this occasion he
wrote his little poem of "Cadenus and Vanessa." The young lady from
this time was called Vanessa; and her mother dying in 1714, she and
her sister followed the dean to Ireland, where he frequently visited
them; and he kept up a literary correspondence with Vanessa until her
death, which followed clo